Mr. Jonathan Church:

To follow up on Dr. Muinzer's point, there is a duty to "take account of" in the Bill as it stands. Under the UK Act, every five years, the Secretary of State must put in place a plan for meeting carbon budgets so the language is much more hard-edged. Under the UK Act, the Secretary of State, and the UK Government as a whole, have an ongoing duty to have in place proposals and policies that in the opinion of the Secretary of State, or words to that effect, are sufficient to meet those carbon budgets. Those kinds of more direct links are drawn in the UK Act compared with the Bill.

The consequences of not meeting the fourth carbon budget will be highly mitigated. It gets very technical. It involves extra credits that are in the carbon budgeting system. That system in the UK Act has given a lot of hot air, as it were, for the UK Government to be able to say it meets its budgets without actually having undertaken all of the necessary emissions reductions, so, on paper, it will be able to say it met its budget. In my statement, I used the words "meeting the budget in full" or something like that, which was just a way of making that distinction. Once one starts missing one's budgets in the real sense, one is off track and the more off track one is, the harder it becomes to get back on track. I do not think there will be any legal consequence of the UK Government not meeting its fourth carbon budget in full. It will just make it increasingly hard to meet the fifth and potentially the sixth carbon budget and at some point, I fear there will be a kind of breaking point and it may be difficult to see a way to meet the targets.